Good Things Come to Those Who (Can) Wait or How to Handle Delay Tolerant Traffic and Make Peace on the Internet

Recent revelations that ISPs selectively manipulate P2P traffic have sparked much public discussion. Underlying this issue is the misalignment of interests between consumers on one hand who desire bulk transfers at flat rates, and ISPs on the other hand who are bound by budget and capacity constraints. Our thesis is that much of the tension can be alleviated by time-shifting traffic away from peak hours taking advantage of its Delay Tolerant (DT) nature. We propose two solutions for doing this. The first one offers incentives to end-users to shift their DT traffic and yet be compatible with flat-rate charging schemes. The second one posits augmenting the network with additional storage in the form of Internet Post Offices which can let ISPs perform store-and forward relaying of such DT traffic.